Ubisoft ends its NFT experiment in Ghost Recon Breakpoint but promises they're 'coming to other games'

pcgamer.com:

Yesterday, Ubisoft announced that Ghost Recon Breakpoint would receive no further content updates(opens in new tab), the final act for a game that had an extremely messy launch(opens in new tab) and never really found its audience. It also ended up being used as a guinea pig for Ubisoft Quartz: the first attempt by a major publisher to incorporate non-fungible tokens in its games. Breakpoint's 'Digits', cosmetics with little numbers on them(opens in new tab), launched in December 2021.

The Breakpoint Digits did not create all that much interest: I kept checking trading sites for a month or two after their launch, and there was barely any activity around them. Now Ubisoft has confirmed that the end of Breakpoint updates also means that the game won't see any more Digits: a message on the Ubisoft Quartz website thanks players who bought them and reads «You own a piece of the game and have left your mark in its history» (thanks, GI.biz(opens in new tab)).

Or in other words: hard cheese hombre! The language around NFTs always zeroes-in on this idea of ownership and legacy and leaving a mark and… it's just all such obvious nonsense. The idea that someone who bought a pair of gloves with a serial number 'owns' a piece of Breakpoint is as absurd as the idea that anyone will care about the 'history' of in-game items.

The Digits always felt like a weak pitch anyway, little more than 'limited edition' cosmetics. But now they show that the grander NFT promise—transferring items between games and 'owning' them in perpetuity—for the bunk it is. Players won't be able to do anything with their Breakpoint Digits now other than, erm, wear them in Breakpoint (or try to offload them onto the next sap).

The whole thing actually makes me